What to do with $1 trillion dollars

In PW this week, they review a book coming out in July asks the question: if we weren't blowing $1 trillion on the "unwar" in Iraq, what could we spend it on?

May as well put an unpaid plug in here: What We Could Have Done with the Money: 50 Ways to Spend the Trillion Dollars We've Spent on Iraq, by Rob Simpson.

Some of the ideas from the book cited in the review are great: providing every human on Earth with an iPod; taking every Iraqi citizen to an MLB game (we'll win them over with Dodger Dogs!); fixing Social Security AND Medicare...

But what else could we do with $1 trillion dollars?

If you wanted to see some *real* drama, you could buy 502,512,562,814 episodes of Degrassi: The Next Generation from iTunes.

Or, if you prefer to Tivo it, you could afford 3,344,481,605 3-month subscriptions to Tivo...approximately half of the Earth's population (almost exactly half, actually).

But you need to get off your ass, so you buy 4,016,064,257 Wiis (or 3,134,894,511 Wiis, if you include the Wii Fit to whip everyone into shape).

While you're a gadget head, you like to enrich your mind, so you decide to buy 2,506,265,664 Amazon Kindles (that's 8 Kindle's per person, plus a couple of bucks for books).

Eh, I love the Kindle, but I love me my hardcover books more, so that $1 trillion will probably go towards buying 40,080,160,321 books. Ahhh...heaven....

Course, you need to store the 40 billion books somewhere, so why not buy 12,501,562,695 Billy bookcases from IKEA? Each bookcase would hold approximately 157 books, so we'd really only be using 255,287,645 of the bookcases).

With all this knowledge, you really should go to school, so why not share the wealth? How about sending 11,151,753 kids to school on a full-ride, four-year scholarship to UCLA? Yup, every single kid in California could be going to UCLA full-ride, with an off-campus apartment with a few billion left over.

So these kids need to get to class, right? Fine, we'll go ahead and buy 47,393,365 Priuses (hey, if we're going to buy so many, might as well have a smaller carbon inprint, right?).

What, UCLA not good enough? You're a total snob, aren't you. Alright then, you win. How about we send 4,810,653 kids to USC on a full-ride? Sure, they'd have to live on-campus, but what do they need to go off-campus for anyway? And those almost-5 billion kids? Yeah, that's every child above the age of 5 years old going to school....

This is just getting me depressed. I think I'm gonna go hunt down a cookie (it's the least...most...whatever...I can afford).